Revving Up Research at UT Dallas with Cyberinfrastructure

Since its founding in 1969, The University of Texas at Dallas has grown rapidly to become a cutting-edge Tier 1 research institution with a reputation that extends far beyond the borders of the Lone Star State. Fields of study range from space science to cybersecurity, from genomics to brain sciences, from political science to polymer science.

Much of this work couldn’t be carried out without the computational power of high performance computing systems. And UT Dallas makes sure its faculty and students have ready access to a wide range of leading-edge HPC/AI systems. These resources include locally hosted systems operated by the UT Dallas Cyber Infrastructure for Research Department (UTD CI), as well national resources such as supercomputers operated by the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin and by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California San Diego.

The cyberinfrastructure at UT Dallas includes a heterogeneous cluster named Ganymede. This 4786-core cluster is based on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with Intel® Xeon® processors and tied together with a 10 Gigabit Ethernet network and a QDR (40 Gbps) InfiniBand® interconnect. The Callisto system is a 640-core system for evaluating methods, technologies and processes to enhance project funding submissions. Callisto enables individual research teams to have access to one or more Linux or Windows virtual machines on a Windows Hyper-V cluster powered by Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with 16 nodes and 100 TB of storage.

UT Dallas extends its HPC reach with the national supercomputers operated by TACC and the SDSC. For example, a team of UT Dallas researchers is using TACC supercomputers to develop a new way to extract more power from the wind. This approach has the potential to increase wind power generation significantly with a consequent increase in revenue.

Another UT Dallas team is working with collaborators to explore the promise of plasmonic nanovesicles — microscopic pills that could one day travel to a specific location in a patient’s body and deliver a drug just where it is needed. For these explorations, UT Dallas researchers draw on supercomputing resources at TACC and two other institutions.

At Dell Technologies, we’re inspired by the great work being done by UT Dallas researchers on the university’s local Dell EMC HPC/AI systems, as well as the systems at TACC and SDSC, both of which leverage high performance computing and artificial intelligence solutions from Dell Technologies.

To learn more

For the full story, read the Dell EMC case study “Cyber-infrastructure fuels research.” And to explore Dell EMC PowerEdge servers with Intel Xeon processors in HPC/AI applications, visit dellemc.com/hpc and dellemc.com/ai.